With the Senate's
failure to muster even a bare majority for the
conviction of Bill Clinton, some conservatives are near despair. "I no
longer believe that there is a moral majority," writes veteran activist
Paul Weyrich. "I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually
share our values."

"If there really were a moral majority, Bill Clinton
would have been driven out of office months ago," he laments. "The
culture we are living in has become an ever-wider sewer. ... we are
caught up in a cultural collapse ... so great that it simply overwhelms
politics."

He urges conservatives to "drop out" and "quarantine"
themselves from a poisoned culture and the politics it has produced.
Henry Hyde echoes his despair, "I wonder if, after this culture war is
over ... an America will survive that will be worth fighting to
defend."

Is the culture war over? Has our culture become so
debased that conservatives have no choice but to secede? To answer
those questions, we must ask first: At its original and deepest level,
what is the culture war all about? Who are the contending forces?

Ultimately, our culture war is about one question: Is
God dead, or is God king? For centuries, this issue has been crucial.
If God is dead, as Nietzsche wrote, everything is permissible, and
eventually, one will logically reach the conclusion of Paris' student
radicals of 1968: The only thing that is forbidden is to forbid.

But if God is king, men have a duty to try, as best they
can, to conform their lives to his will and shape society in accordance
with his law. Defection and indifferentism are not options open to us.
We are commanded to fight.

Yet, looking back over recent decades, it is impossible
to deny that an anti-Western counterculture has completed its long
march through America's institutions, capturing the arts,
entertainment, the public schools and colleges, the media and even many
churches.

In politics, conservatives have won more than they have
lost, but in the culture, the left and its Woodstock values have
triumphed. Divorce, dirty language, adultery, blasphemy, euthanasia,
abortion, pornography, homosexuality, cohabitation and so on were not
unknown in 1960. But today, they permeate our lives.

The critical change has come in the attitudes of our
elites. What our leaders once believed to be symptoms of social decline
many now celebrate as harbingers of a freer, better society. What was
once decried as decadence is now embraced as progress.

Born to sin, men have always done wrong. The sea change
is that society no longer accepts the old distinctions between right
and wrong. Thus, the young are astonished that Clinton, having been
consecrated in the secular sacrament of free elections, might be
punished and removed for something so trivial as perjury.

The counterculture of the 1960s is now the dominant
culture. As in France in 1789, most of the intellectuals have gone over
to the revolution. America has been converted, and her conversion may
prove as historic as that of Constantinian Rome to Christianity.

Politics is the last contested battlefield of our
culture war, for only through politics can the new cult, a militant and
intolerant secularist faith that will abide no other, impose its values
on us.

But how, then, does it avail us to withdraw from
politics, to retreat, to give up? Where do we go? What shall we do?

We cannot quit. We can no more walk away from the
culture war than we could walk away from the Cold War. For the culture
war is at its heart a religious war about whether God or man shall be
exalted, whose moral beliefs shall be enshrined in law, and what
children shall be taught to value and abhor. With those stakes, to walk
away is to abandon your post in time of war.

Is the battle truly lost? Or, as traditionalist Russell
Kirk argued, can a culture renew itself by its very struggle to renew
itself, even as the striving of sinners to lead good lives is the
making of saints? Perhaps T.S. Eliot was right when he said there are
no lost causes, because there are no won causes. The struggle is
eternal.

What is needed today is the same awareness that finally
hit the conservative men of America in the early 1770s. Loyal to their
king, they had rejected the counsel of Sam Adams to rebel against him
and fight. Finally, it dawned on these conservatives that they had to
become radicals; they had to overthrow the king's rule to keep what
they had. And they found in George Washington a conservative leader
with the perseverance to take us to victory over an enemy superior in
every way but courage and character.

(c) 1999 Patrick J.
Buchanan

~~~O~~~

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